How the mobile app helped us run a conference with 700 attendees

USER CASE: Use of mobile app by YGLF conference

You Gotta Love Frontend conference, or simply YGLF, is the largest frontend conference in the Middle East, built by developers for developers. Four years in a row it hosts amazing internationally recognized speakers from all around the globe to speak about the most relevant topics, that any Frontend admirer would love to hear.

I'm Anna Fridman, my day job is Customer Success manager at monday.com. By night I'm the co-organizer of YGLF conf, who's in charge of sales and marketing activities, as well as some operational activities.

Since YGLF is a non-profit event and all the team members are volunteers, so we are multitasking a lot and taking over each other's tasks all the time. monday.com has been essential to share relevant details and take up the tasks easily

How the boards are arranged

The structure of the boards is very-very simple (the easier the better, right?). There are several boards for different parts of the project: Speakers Pool board where we keep the contacts of current, past, and potential speakers; Credentials; list of Influencers we want to promote the event through; Design Assets; plan for Social Media activities, etc.

Two boards that we've established on a desktop, but used mainly in the mobile app are "Flights & Accommodation" and "Speakers".

How the mobile app saved us

Both these boards were used to work with the speakers: to track if all the details from the speakers (for example, their picture for the website) were received, rehearsals scheduled, info about the talks, accommodation details, etc.

Initially Speakers board was set up in a browser, here is what it looks like:

This board server as a CRM of all the speakers' info, and it's become amazingly useful when the most stressful time came - the event itself.

It's important to mention that at the event all team members were constantly on the go, so the mobile app was a lifesaver for us! Here's what this board looks like on the mobile:

All the contact details and hotel name columns were moved to the left side of the board, so that it would be convenient to access using the mobile. Here are several examples of when we used it:

All the speakers were in the same order in this board as they were planned to speak at the event, and if we had any changes, for example, we needed to change the order of the lineup, we could simply do this in the board, and everyone would be immediately updated:

Whenever we needed to call one of the speakers, we could simply click on the number in the Phone column, and it would automatically trigger the call:

We used the Checkbox column to track which speaker needs a taxi pickup (and who has already got into the taxi), and who preferred to walk to the venue from the hotel. This allowed us to ensure that everyone's at the venue in the right time, and no-one is left behind.

Without the mobile app I'd need to have all the info and lists printed out, manually add notes to the papers. Given the lack of sleep during the preparation, I'd lose these papers eventually. It would be extremely difficult to keep all the team members updated on the status and changes, and nearly impossible to delegate the tasks to each other if you need to step away.

With these boards in the mobile app, we all stayed on the same page at all times; we could update everyone on the team immediately and in the context (instead of having one WhatsApp chat for everything or calling everyone) and make sure all went smoothly!

Want to find more ideas that will help you increase your productivity? Visit https://monday.com/stories to find real stories from our users through a variety of categories, explaining how monday.com helps them to set their goals and improve their teamwork

Anna Fridman, YGLF co-organizer

If you have more questions to me, feel free to reach out directly via email.